A subject is a person as produced by the institutions, practices, and discourses that act on them. The word carries a deliberate double meaning: a subject is both the one who acts (the thinking subject of philosophy) and the one who is acted upon (the subject of a king, the subject of an experiment). Michel Foucault used the term to name this double bind: people are constituted as agents through the same processes that constitute them as objects of power [@foucault1977].
Subjectification names the process: the production of subjects through practices of classification, examination, and normalization. The school doesn’t receive a “student” — it produces one through enrollment, placement testing, grading, and daily routine. The student’s self-understanding (“I’m good at math,” “I’m a troublemaker”) is shaped by the categories the institution uses to classify them. Subjectification operates both through categorization by others (institutional classifications like “delinquent” or “gifted”) and through self-formation (people come to understand themselves through the categories institutions provide).
Subjectification isn’t the same as oppression, though it can involve it. A person can be subjectified as “capable,” “healthy,” “normal” — categories that carry privilege rather than punishment. The point isn’t that all subjectification is bad but that the categories through which people are known and know themselves are products of institutional practices, not descriptions of what people naturally are. They are contingent: they could have been otherwise. This is what Foucault meant by saying that power is “productive” — it doesn’t just say “you can’t do that,” it says “you are this kind of person,” and it produces the knowledge that makes that claim stick.
Related terms
- knowledge — the mechanism through which institutions produce subjects by producing knowledge about them
- Discourse — the rule-governed systems that determine what can be said about a subject
- Normalization — the process by which subjects are measured against standards of normality
- Biopower — the governance of subjects at the level of populations and biological life