| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Throughout his work, Foucault busies himself with the study of how discourse may constitute individual subjects, constantly insisting on the importance of historical specificity. Discourses are described as “ways of constituting knowledge” (Weedon 108), which includes the understanding and internalisation of such presumed ‘natural’ items as the body or thoughts. Within Foucauldian economics, the meaning of the body or sexuality is far from ‘natural’; it is, rather, defined by a network of power relations integrated by historically specific discourses. His perspective, however, is not totalitarian. Foucault does not conceive of discourses as mechanisms closed in on themselves; on the contrary, the very organisation of one discourse and its implied subject positions, brings about the possibility of alternative subjectivities which might subvert the power established by the initial discourse: “[d]iscourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it but it also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it” (Foucault, History 101). This does not imply, however, that a discourse may bring about its own binary opposite:
A discourse of power, according to Foucault, bears the inscription of its own possibility of resistance to the power it has established. In other words, the potentiality of a discourse of power implies that it is already ‘infected’ by its own resistance to it, “without changing [its] form” (History 102).
With the notion of a discursive subject which is not produced within itself, from which nothing originates, since meaning is also produced outside it, and which is the result of the desire for an organic loss, the presumed binary between a knowledge which is objective as opposed to one which is subjective irremediably vanishes: “[w]hat is outside the subject constitutes subjectivity; the subject invades the objectivity of what it knows” (Belsey, Poststructuralism 73).