Knowing dissent: the Enlightenment subject within contemporary politics of subjectivity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes as a starting point journalistic and scholarly commentaries that diagnose new forms of subjectivity emerging through the global protest events of 2009–2013: a plural subject, a networked subject, or a newly autonomous subject. I juxtapose Michel Foucault’s problematization of the form of the modern Enlightenment subject with these commentaries to argue that their diagnoses pay insufficient attention to the epistemological frameworks through which understandings of subjectivity are produced. While commentators view shifts of consciousness as significant to the expression of new forms of subjectivity, I suggest that this view is indicative of a modern tradition of emancipation that requires the modern subject. I conclude that a closer engagement with the work of Foucault and Ashis Nandy on the relationship between epistemology and practices of dissent reveals the epistemological limits through which subjectivity is produced, emphasizing the adaptability and persistence of the modern subject as an epistemological category.