Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism by Todd May

Author:Todd May
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

M. Foucault, "Afterword," in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 208.

32. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 387.

For Foucault, the subject is constituted rather than constituting. This does not, however, mean that people are determined. The subject, as such, is a historical construction that emerged from practices that were both political and epistemological. We think of ourselves as subjects, we act as subjects, and in that sense we are subjects: "[I]t exists, it has a reality." But subjectivity ("There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge"),34 since it is a historical phenomenon dependent upon the practices from which it emerged and which sustain it, can be altered or abolished by new practices. These practices cannot emanate from a subject—as an act of subjective will— but they can come from people inserting their actions into the contingent web of historical events and institutions. The constitution of the subject is not the exhaustive determination of behavior, although inasmuch as it is appropriated as a mode of self-knowledge, and thus as a mode of living, subjectivity will define the parameters of our options, our powers, and the normal and acceptable range of our behavior.

Deleuze's positing of forces subtending the objects of experience already subverts any commitment to the idea of a self-determining subject. What Deleuze rejects is both the self-mastery and the unity that the idea of subjectivity implies. Regarding self-mastery. Deleuze emphasizes throughout his writings the role of one sort of unconscious or another in determining both action and self-consciousness. Thus, "To remind consciousness of its necessary modesty is to take it for what it is: a symptom; nothing but the symptom of a deeper transformation of the activities of entirely non-spiritual forces."35 These unconscious forces, moreover, form a diversity rather than a unity. In Dialogues, Deleuze claims that individuals and groups are the intersection and development of three different kinds of "lines": 1) segmentary lines, like those of a person's life cycle (e.g., family-school-army-job-retirement); 2) molecular lines, which are the invisible forces, coming from disparate directions in the social field and acting more subtly than the "molar" segmentary lines; and 3) lines of flight, which are other molecular lines we draw to escape our determination by the specific molar and molecular lines that constitute us.J6

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