‘The Subject and Power’ – Four Decades Later: Tracing Foucault’s Evolving Concept of Subjectivation

Michel Foucault’s essay ‘The Subject and Power’ has seen four decades. It is the most quoted of Foucault’s shorter texts and exerts a persistent influence across the social sciences and humanities. The essay merges two main trajectories of Foucault’s research in the 1970s: his genealogies of legal-disciplinary power and his studies of pastoral power and governance. This article connects these two trajectories to Althusser’s thesis on the ideological state apparatuses, demonstrating affinities between Althusser’s thesis and Foucault’s diagnosis of the welfare state as a ‘matrix’ of individualising and totalising power. The article suggests that Foucault’s essay straddles between two different concepts of subjectivation. First, one encounters the citizen ‘internally subjugated’ by disciplinary and pastoral power, whereas, at the end, we find a ‘flat’ subject of governance; a form of power which intervenes only in the environment in which individuals make their rational, self-fashioning choices. The implication of Foucault’s newfound concept of governance is a weakening of the link between subjectivation and the formation of the state, which also meant that the state’s role in reproducing capitalism receded into the background of Foucauldian scholarship. Finally, the article suggests extending Foucault’s analytical ‘matrix’ to current techniques of subjectivation associated with the advent of big data and artificial intelligence, which buttress the expansive technique of predictive profiling.