Althusser to Foucault: from structuralism to poststructuralism

It is in this moment that another important shift in our understanding of subjectivity took place: In this section we want to think about the importance of the move from ideology to power/knowledge and from a theory of the subject to an understanding of subjectification/subjection. We want to begin by citing the founding editorial of a journal, Ideology and Consciousness, from 1976. This statement about psychology, ideology and the human subject sums up the post-Althusserian position quite nicely:


This position conceives of the social formation as a complex, over-determined and contradictory nexus of discursive practices, in which the human subject is constituted and lives in a relation of absolute interiority. No region orlevel of the social formation is contemplated which stands outside the discursive practices in which the material activities of concrete subjects consist; the social formation is equivalent to the non-unified totality of these practices. The human subject is not seen as occupying a given “place” within a “social structure”, but as constituted in the intersections of a determinate set of discursive practices which take their particularity from the totality of practices in which they are articulated. The concept of discursive practice thus theorises the internal relation between the constitution and existence of human subjects in the totality and the always-ongoing processes of production and reproduction of that totality. (Adlam et al., 1976, p. 46)

In addition, the journal title, linking ideology and consciousness, makes that Althusserian/Lacanian axis clear. In its later issues, the journal changed its name to I and C. This was much discussed in the small circles around the journal as signalling a retreat from Marxism. What it could also be understood as is a move towards poststructuralism, particularly the work of Foucault, and away from the structuralism of Althusser. This shift was seen to be one that took us towards an acknowledgement of plurality and the historical specificity of structures. This move signalled a sense that Foucault's work on power/knowledge understood subject positions as formed within the apparatuses of power/knowledge, the discursive practices and technologies of the social through which subjectification occurred. That this was historically specific and plural was crucial.

We moved away from a singular theory and a singular pathway understood through psychoanalysis. This also implied moving away from ideology. This is because Foucault understood the human and social sciences, for example, as creating knowledge that itself was a “fiction functioning in truth” or a “regime of truth”. He therefore followed Althusser but went beyond him, in claiming not that science was ideological but that all knowledge was itself fictional and productive of subjects.

This placed a great deal of emphasis on the historical emergence or genealogy of the present “truths”, and on the multiple sites through which these historically contingent truths are productive of positions for subjects to be formed. It is important to note that Foucault also rejected Althusser's singular causal chain leading back to the economy, in favour of a more complex place for the economy as one of the multiple conditions of possibility. This was widely understood as the final rejection of Marxism.

Thus, we can begin to see a distinction between subjects as produced in power/knowledge and subjectivity, which we could call the experience of being subjected. It is important to separate one from the other. Subjectivity, in this account, is the experience of the lived multiplicity of positionings. It is historically contingent and is produced through the plays of power/knowledge and is sometimes held together by desire.

This account was taken up with great vigour in certain quarters and while I and C was one of the first places to publish Foucauldian work in English, the use of this approach is now ubiquitous. It is worth noting that this relied upon Foucault's work before the publication of the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality. We will come to this in due course. First, it is important to note the development of this work with respect to subjectivity via the jointly authored book Changing the Subject (Henriques et al., 1984). This book attempted to link together a Foucauldian approach to subjectification with an attempt to use psychoanalysis to understand how positions were held together for any one subject.

The slippage around the word “subject” is worth noting here. In Foucault the subject is discursive in that it is a textual position. This is not co-terminous with the person. The issue about how this maps onto practices and experiences of people is a matter that Foucault does not consider in this early work. Thus the authors of Changing the Subject attempted to work on subjectivity as “more than the sum total of positions in discourse since birth”, and so to use psychoanalysis in conjunction with Foucault to understand the complexities of the experience of being a subject, subjectivity.

Foucault's later work transformed the ways in which some, notably those associated with governmentality theory, approached Foucault's account of subjection. Here, experience was experience of self-regulation and it is in this work that the body came to have more salience. Those using this framework were quite against any in-depth reading of an idea of unconscious processes because it implied a transhistorical subject, which took us back to Althusser. It is in this interplay between the subject and subjectivity that the current horizon of interest in subjectivities is born, and which has produced some of the productive tensions that are now being played out in new and novel ways.