subject as subject and object – Foucault

The trouble is, how does this ideology continually interpellate individuals as subjects?  Don’t they have a say in this interpellation process? Can all individuals be brought under the sway of ideology? And doesn’t the Althussarian conception of the subject have the whiff of absolutism about it? Althusser is unclear on these points. Foucault, however, picks up on some of these points in his writings that are concerned with the relations and forces which constitute the subject, distinct from a conception of an autonomous subject whose reason and agency constitutes knowledge (and learning) and endows the world with meaning. We, as subjects, have to search the realm of knowledge looking for meaning and self-understanding: and I don’t think Foucault is meaning to be existential here. We are both the subject and object of knowledge and this seems especially true of this thing called executive education – the educational philosophy of which is the theme of this blog. Leadership, management, executive education; the development and accrual of human capital; the investment in this particular and peculiar managerial asset class; all of these placeholders for what it is that goes on in business schools (one site among many) seem to regard the subject (the manager, leader, executive, etc.) of these endeavors as the object of its study, whilst at the same time this object is being worked through and produced.

the subjection of the subject – Althusser

Blimey! -what’s this? Executivezen’s off again, on her wild goose chase to find the agency of  education, the who, the subject with which we (executive education educators) have a relationship. What’s brought this one on is a stint of reading Althusser. I’ve just been reading Reading Capital where Althusser looks through idealist and essentialist readings of the singular subject towards the ideology that creates that subject. The ideological state apparatuses and repressive state apparatuses. Althusser is not concerned with investigating what particular subjects may think – i.e. what executives, managers or leaders learn from our dealings with them in educational institutions – but rather he is concerned with the ideological mechanism overlayed (I was being polite there, but I mean that we overlay) onto our educational/developmental/learning subjects. The educational, etc., ideologies through which perception, learning, subjectivity are produced. My interest is in foregrounding the ideologies we (unconsciously) use. For instance, consider our modalities of chinos, of casual dress, of splitting into syndicate groups, the plenary discussion, the classroom games and overt political shenanigans of getting onto the educational programme in the first place. And by our here I mean both the institution of b-schools and its customers (see previous post). All of these modalities insert the subject into the materiality of educational (managerial, corporatist) ideology. These ideological practices, on our part, work not only to tame and discipline consciousness but also to normalize and subjugate the body according to certain – educational, developmental, learning – models of behaviour. We create our subjects: they don’t preexist outside of our ideological practices and texts. As Althusser states, the ’subject’ is both a noun and a verb, ‘to subject’.

Now, if you can change this ideological indoctrination, you can change the behaviour of these subjects without even a peep from the ‘what’ of what it is they’re learning. If we relinquish notions of the essentiality of the subject, we can relinquish the subject’s sovereign status as… and there’s a whole long list here, such as ‘learner’, ‘change agent’, ‘executive’, ‘manager’, ‘leader’ – in fact, we could create some more epithets since it’s us that create the subjects that we deal with. Spooky!