Discourse/Subjectivity

Which story will I tell about Michel Foucault?

Discourses, semiotics, and arrangements of materials of all kinds. Note that: arrangements of materials of all kinds.

Talk, forms of storytelling, classical and modern (Foucault 1970, 1972). Systems of knowledge that are embodied in collections, cabi­nets of curiosities, museums, state records, statistics, doctors’ sur­geries (Foucault 1976). Buildings, including the shapes of prisons, real and imaginary (Foucault 1979), arcades for visual display, for the gaze,13 and the Boulevards of Haussman, which cut their clean and ordered way through the pullulating quarters of old Paris. Not to men­tion the new towns of Morocco.14

And then bodies. Yes, for notwithstanding the suggestion that he ignores the specificities of embodiment, the logics of the body itself, there is nevertheless little doubt that Foucault is particularly inter­ested in bodies, bodies and souls. He is interested in how to sepa­rate them, how to keep them together, how they are overseen, how they are marked, how they are broken down into little components and then reassembled, pressed into disciplinary forms. How bodies are made in the process of loading a musket in twenty easy steps, walking in formation steady under fire, without the need for further discipline or further orders. And then how pleasures, sexualities, are constructed, pleasures that will normalize themselves and thereby perform disciplinary effects because such are the ways in which the soul, the body, the possibilities of pleasure, have been constructed.15

Bodies and souls, and then the other materials: talk, buildings, texts, statistics, maps, plans. Techniques for constituting materials and relating them. For Foucault is a semiotician, and in his archae­ology he attempts to decode the logics of relations, the spaces made available by those logics, the spaces, or at any rate the hints of the spaces, denied and made Other by such logics, discourses, or epis – temes.

Of course, yes ‘‘of course,’’ the distinction between the personal and the rest is of no analytical significance. For the person is, accord­ing to Foucault, a subject position constituted in the ruthless logic of a discourse, for instance a disciplinary discourse, while whatever is outside the person is, well, another set of positions that stands in relation to and performs that person, that subject position: for in­stance knowledge, what is known, or better “knowledges.” So the dis­tinctions “public/private” or ‘‘knowledge/personal’’ are made, consti­tuted in the enabling logics of discourse that run through, permeate, and perform the materials of the social. They go everywhere, into our bodies, our practices, our texts, our knowledges, our town plans, our buildings, and all the rest.16

Foucault’s method is quite different from Elias’s, but for certain purposes the result is similar. If the truth has nothing to do with the personal and the ephemeral, then that is an effect. It is an effect that fails to notice that the divide is being made continuously through time and through different materials—because the continuities, the logics, the discourses, run through the materials, human and non­human alike.