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HOW NOT TO BE GOVERNED IN THAT WAY?
In Foucault’s writing on subjectivity there are two distinct points of emphasis, the first is typically represented in his argument that there are two meanings to the word “subject”: “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings indicate a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to” (Foucault, 1982, p. 212). Here, particularly in the latter sense, “personal” qualities such as self-esteem and empowerment, as well as our hopes and dreams, fantasies and desires are artefacts of power. Subjectivity is the possibility of lived experience within a context—political and economic. Subjectivity is thus “the real basis of the self as both agent and object” (McGushin, 2011, p. 129) and enables the identities which we claim, and these identities are historically contingent. We are made up, constituted, within this double bind. However, Foucault also argued that power is an “agonism” (1982, p. 222) that is, a relationship that is a reciprocal incitement and struggle, less a confrontation than a “permanent provocation” (p. 222), and that power is therefore exercised only over free subjects who are “faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realised” (p. 221). Here then, and much more to the fore in his last sequence of work, is a different way of thinking about subjectivity and about the ways in which we give form to our lives and to ourselves. That is, the idea of subjectivity as what we do, rather than who we are, as an active process of becoming, as the work of “the care of the self ”. That is, an art or technology of living, a set of practices through which we establish a relationship to ourselves of self-examination and determined artfulness, and through which some possibilities of freedom may be achieved,
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