Methodological individualism?

The characterisation of Foucault’s late work as individualist appears quite easy to dismiss. While this goes some way to making his late work seem reconcilable with the earlier (in that reducing the emphasis on the subject in his later work suggests a better with fit with the similar lack of emphasis in the earlier), it doesn’t itself suggest a continuity in Foucault’s oeuvre. For even if the later work is not propagating an individualist version of the subject that seems at odds with the structural emphasis of his earlier writings, the critic may still point out that methodologically, Foucault has shifted from doing history without the subject to appearing entirely subject-focussed. Such criticism has been levelled at Foucault. After supposedly practicing a more objectivist history in his previous publications, his later pieces on the Hellenistic period become too much like a standard intentional reading of sources.¹⁸⁰ This raises the question of whether the methodology of his earlier work fits with that of his later, or whether the focus on individual experience in his later writings is at odds with an

that is deemed as concerning moral conduct, (2) the ‘mode of subjectivation’ or the way people are made to recognise their moral obligations, (3) the ‘ethical work’ or means by which one forms oneself into an ethical subject, and (4) the telos or the kind of ethical being that the subject aspires to be in their moral behaviour. This is taken from his 1983 interview

‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress’, in Rabinow 1997, pp. 263-266. We could potentially use this framework to analyse various forms of ethical self-poesis on a Foucauldian framework.

179 L. Ucnik, ‘Ethic-Political Engagement and the Self-Constituting Subject in Foucault’, 2018, p. 64. For further discussion of Foucault’s specific conception of ethics see J. Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics, New York, Routledge, 1991.

180 M. Poster, ‘Foucault and the Tyranny of Greece’, in Focault: A Critical Reader, 1986, p.

217.

earlier lack thereof. As Gary Gutting has put it, “the ‘experience’ of the last two volumes of the history of sexuality signals a return of the subject”.¹⁸¹ Can this return be reconciled?

Many scholars would argue that it can. Although in his later writing Foucault comes to focus more directly on the subject as his object of study, there is a continuity in the methodology of his project that allows us to combine his accounts of subjectivity. In the first place, we must contextualise the discourse that we are examining as “the specific focus of Foucault’s ethical concern is comprehensible only in the context of his project for the history of sexuality”.¹⁸² We must look at the way that his project was framed, and this reveals it as intimately linked to his work on power. In the introduction to the second volume of his history of sexuality, Foucault notes that his intention was not to study particular behaviour or representations but sexuality itself. It is “a matter of seeing how an ‘experience’ came to be constituted in modern Western societies, an experience that caused individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a ‘sexuality’”.¹⁸³ There are two key fields of analysis for Foucault here. Firstly, there is the analysis of how the systems of knowledge and power, to which the subject of sexuality was accessible, effect the subject. As Foucault points out, his previous work on power-knowledge provided the tools for this investigation.¹⁸⁴ Secondly, this analysis required the contentious turn towards the subject. Here we can see however, that for Foucault at least, such a move did not necessarily represent a break with his earlier work, but naturally followed on from the analyses of power-knowledge, taking them into a different area of study.

Other scholars follow Foucault in this reading of continuity in his work, particularly on subjectivity. For example, C.J. Heyes reads “this latter work [HotS] as a continuation of Foucault’s analysis of normalization and discipline”.¹⁸⁵ While his earlier work showed how external powers determine identity through techniques of discipline and normalisation, the latter work now reveals the internal aspect to this.¹⁸⁶ Practices of self-formation encourage

181 G. Gutting, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 1994, p. 13. Emphasis added.

182 J.W. Bernaure and M. Mahon, ‘The Ethics of Michel Foucault’, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 1994, p. 144.

183 M. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality 2, trans R. Hurley, London, Penguin, 1986, p. 4.

184 Ibid., p. 4.

185 C.J. Heyes, Self-Transformations, 2007, p. 31.

186 This is made even less straightforward by the external determination of subjectivity also having to work through the subject in DP (see section 2.3.3. below). In this sense, even the

the subject to see themself a certain way and form their identity as such, but this always occurs in an environment of external influence. Thus, we can read Foucault’s work as encompassing two different aspects of normalization, both the internal and external, with different periods of publication focussing more on each one. As Heyes further states, “in turning to technologies of the self [Foucault] was trying to find a different angle on the same problem that had earlier occupied his attention – that of the constitution of the subject within a nexus of power/knowledge – but from the perspective of the ethical agent who must establish a relation to his own subjectivity”.¹⁸⁷ We can generalize this from Foucault’s study of power. Remember, Foucault is from the beginning questioning the idea of subjectivity.

From his first works he was challenging the liberal-humanist assumptions of the subject.

When we take this into account, even though it foregrounds the subject more than previous, we can see his later writings in a different light. As Johanna Oksala puts it, “Foucault’s studies of the history of ethics can thus be seen as a continuation of his attempt to rethink the subject, this time the forms of the self”.¹⁸⁸ Foucault’s project thereby continues, although with a different object of focus.

By framing Foucault’s writings around subjectivity and the influences on it we can thus find continuity within his works. Although his specific object of focus may change, the underlying methodology of his project continues.¹⁸⁹ Foucault shifts his analysis to a new object, allowing for the further extension of his theories. Although the subject does is foregrounded as an object of examination unlike in his previous work, we can read this as an extension of the critical attitude towards subjectivity that Foucault has taken throughout his

earlier work is concerned with the internal, subjective aspect of the determiniation of subjectivity.

187 Ibid., p. 114.

188 J. Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, 2005, p. 163.

189 Such a move mirrors that made in another debate about continuity in Foucault, that of the introduction of the state as an object of analysis after Discipline and Punish (DP). As in the debate around the ‘return of the subject’ in Foucault, here Foucault is also accused of suddenly shifting his analysis to an object that he had previously denied. For a view that similarly suggests that continuity here, see M. Senellart, ‘Course Context’, in M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1997-1978, trans. G.

Burchell, New York, Palgrave, 2007, p. 377. For an opposing view to Senellart’s on continuity in Foucault’s work here, see S.J. Collier, ‘Topologies of Power: Foucault’s Analysis of Political Governmnet Beyond Governmnetality’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 26, no. 6, 2009, pp.

78-108.

work, now more explicitly expressed. Although disputed, this is not a fringe view, as I hope to have shown above. The question is then how the two aspects of subjectivity can best be combined through Foucault’s writings. Having already argued that the supposed individualism in his late work is somewhat exaggerated, I now turn my attention to showing how we can see a more active subjectivity in his early work. Through the combination of these two moves I hope to show that two different accounts have more commonality than may at first appear.