| Chapter : | Introduction |
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dominant ideology. David Richter describes New Historicism as a child of its philosophical age:
The field of cultural studies, for which Lévi-Strauss and Foucault are seminal figures, grew from these inquiries into the structure of power and the subtle nature of culture and communication. Though a distinct discipline, cultural studies embraces this practice and remains linked to New Historicism in academic thought, in part because cultural studies “is much harder to pin down” (Richter 1322). Like Althusser, Foucault sees social power as embroiled in ideology rather than something which must be enforced through direct action. Foucault, however, moves away from Althusser's highly structured, state-authored system of ideological power towards a diffuse, self-monitored network of norms and cultural expectations that render subjects docile. Power, he argues, is not owned and used by dominant classes, but is instead dispersed throughout practices imbedded within culture. This concept of non-centralized power, still in service of a dominant group or ideology, imagines the force of social expectations as subtle, insidious, and internalized by subjects. Thus, “suspicions arise concerning the absolute nature and creative role of the subject,” although the notion of the subject should be “reconsidered” rather than “abandoned” (Foucault, “What is an Author?” 148). The Foucauldian subject exists in a “system of dependencies” that shapes his or her subject position and must be “analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse” (Foucault, “What is an Author?” 148).
Cultural norms are, for Foucault, the very seat of social power; his self-regulating subject is disciplined through internalized concepts of social judgment, dependent on the idea that we are all subjected to constant scrutiny. His metaphorical use in Discipline and Punish of Jeremy