Becoming Subjects: Power and Ideology
We rarely wake up wondering how we became the person we believe ourselves to be. We assume that our beliefs, desires, identities, and even our sense of freedom are genuinely our own. But what if the very feeling of being an autonomous individual were itself historically and socially produced?
How, then, do power and ideology enter this story? What do these concepts actually mean, beyond their everyday political usage? Are they external forces acting upon us, or are they the very conditions through which we come to know ourselves? And to what extent can we assume that our thoughts, identities, and choices are truly autonomous?
Power as in Possession?
By power, we could mean almost anything; at least judging by how casually we use the word.
In the corporate world, power is the ability to determine how much of the value someone creates actually returns to them as a paycheck – as in monoposny power. Within families, power often appears in the simple command: “Don’t do that.”In intimate relationships, affection can quietly become power, where labels such as “crazy” or “hysterical” cease merely to describe and instead discipline. In public life, law appears to possess the authority to define what counts as legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate.
These examples are worlds apart, yet they all seem to point toward the same intuition. Whether we are speaking of corporations, parents, lovers, or governments, we instinctively assume that someone, or something transcendtal, haspower. Power appears as a possession: a resource one accumulates, exercises, transfers, or loses. Politics thus becomes a matter of identifying who possesses power and who does not.
But what if this intuition is itself produced by the very phenomenon it seeks to explain? What if what we take to be the instrument is, in fact, the effect?
This question lies at the heart of two of the twentieth century’s most influential theories of subject formation: Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology. Although emerging from different intellectual traditions, both reject the liberal image of the autonomous individual who simply encounters external constraints, the ditchonomy emphasizing the corresponding components: inner and outer. Neither begins with a sovereign subject who freely acts upon the world. Instead, both ask a prior question: how does one become the kind of subject capable of understanding oneself as free, obedient, rational, deviant, normal, patriotic, masculine, feminine, or productive?
Yet their answers diverge in profound ways. They disagree not merely about political institutions or state authority, but about the very ontology of power. For Althusser, ideology primarily reproduces capitalist relations by obscuring the material conditions under which they operate. For Foucault, power is less interested in concealing reality than in producing it: the productive “theory” of power and its genelogy. It generates the very categories, identities, and truths through which individuals recognize themselves. Their disagreement therefore concerns three related questions: What is power? Where does it operate? And what does it ultimately produce?
These questions matter because they fundamentally alter how we understand human agency. If power is simply something that belongs to rulers, then emancipation consists in redistributing or resisting that possession. If, however, power is woven into the very practices through which subjects are constituted, then freedom can no longer be understood merely as liberation from external domination. The subject seeking liberation is itself already one of power’s effects.
What Is Power? How Is It Characterized?
Modern political thought has often imagined power negatively. It prohibits, censors, represses, or restricts. Power appears whenever freedom disappears - The juridical-discursive hypothesis that Foucault rejects.
Throughout The History of Sexuality, he criticizes what he famously calls the “repressive hypothesis”: the belief that modern societies simply silenced sexuality under Victorian morality. If repression were the defining characteristic of modernity, one would expect sexuality gradually to disappear from public discourse. Yet precisely the opposite occurred. Beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sexuality became the object of unprecedented attention. Doctors examined it. Teachers discussed it. Psychiatrists classified it. Judges legislated it. Parents monitored it. Religious authorities encouraged confession. Scientific institutions generated entire vocabularies devoted to describing sexual behavior.
Modernity did not silence sex. It compelled society to speak about it incessantly.
For Foucault, this proliferation reveals something fundamental about power. Power is productive before it is prohibitive. It does not merely suppress existing identities; it actively creates the conditions under which identities become intelligible, subsequently the useful species.
His discussion of the “implantation of perversion” illustrates this transformation. Under earlier legal regimes, sodomy referred primarily to a prohibited act. One committed sodomy. In nineteenth-century medicine, however, the homosexual became a species of person. Sexual behavior ceased to describe isolated actions and instead became evidence of an interior truth. Though with substaintial effort to conceal the most explicit language, sexuality was transformed from something one did into something one was.
This transformation exemplifies the productive nature of power. Through examination, classification, diagnosis, confession, and documentation, institutions produced subjects capable of recognizing themselves through newly established categories. Medical discourse did not simply discover homosexuality waiting beneath the surface. It produced homosexuality as an intelligible identity within a particular historical regime of truth.
Subjectivity thus emerges not before discourse but through it.
Power therefore performs a double movement. It constitutes individuals as subjects while simultaneously binding them to the categories through which they become recognizable. One becomes both a subject and subjected. Identity appears deeply personal precisely because it has already been organized by historically specific discourses.
This logic becomes especially vivid in Foucault’s edited memoir, Herculine Barbin.
Raised as a girl within a religious institution, Alexina Barbin spent much of her childhood without questioning the gender assigned at birth. Her later romantic attachment to another woman, however, transformed what had previously appeared unproblematic into an object of medical investigation. Physicians examined every aspect of her body in search of its “true” sex. External anatomy, internal organs, bodily sensations, reproductive capacity, and personal testimony all became evidence within an expanding medical dossier.
The tragedy lies not simply in Alexina’s eventual legal reclassification as male. It lies in the operation of discourse itself. Medicine claimed merely to discover a pre-existing biological truth. Yet the procedures through which this truth supposedly emerged, observation, examination, documentation, classification, simultaneously produced the very identity they claimed only to reveal.
Alexina’s ambiguity became irresistible precisely because it resisted final classification. Every examination generated further uncertainty, demanding additional observations, confessions, and documentation. The dossier became less a record of an already existing truth than a technology for endlessly pursuing one. Pleasure, knowledge, and power entered a constitutive circle. The more elusive the truth became, the greater the desire to examine. Power did not merely constrain curiosity; it generated and sustained it.
Power, in other words, does not merely regulate reality. It participates in bringing reality into being.
Althusser begins from a markedly different premise.
Although he likewise rejects the liberal conception of autonomous individuals, his concern is not primarily with the historical production of truth, as in genenology, but with the reproduction of capitalist social relations. In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, ideology represents “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” Rather than producing new realities, ideology obscures the material relations that already structure society.
This distinction is subtle but significant.
For Foucault, discourse produces the categories through which reality becomes intelligible. For Althusser, ideology conceals the relations of exploitation underlying capitalist production. The worker experiences employment as a freely chosen contractual relation rather than a historically specific form of class domination. Ideology succeeds precisely because it transforms contingent social arrangements into self-evident truths.
Interpellation describes this process. Individuals become subjects by recognizing themselves within ideological calls, citizen, student, worker, parent, believer. This recognition appears voluntary, yet it simultaneously secures the reproduction of existing relations of production. Subjects freely occupy positions that ideology has already prepared for them.
The difference between Foucault and Althusser therefore is not that one believes subjects are socially produced while the other does not. Both reject essentialist conceptions of human identity. Their disagreement concerns what production itself means. Foucault understands power as productive of truths, identities, and realities. Althusser understands ideology as productive of subjects precisely through the concealment of the material relations that organize capitalist society.
The disagreement is therefore ontological before it is political. It concerns not simply how power governs, but what power fundamentally is.
Where Does Power Live?
If power is not something one possesses, where should we look for it?
This question marks the second major divergence between Foucault and Althusser.
For Foucault, the search for power should not begin with the state, nor with those who ostensibly “possess” authority. Instead, it begins with the mundane interactions that constitute everyday life. The relationship between doctor and patient, teacher and student, employer and employee, parent and child, the duplets, these seemingly ordinary encounters are the sites where power is exercised most effectively. It is here that individuals are observed, examined, evaluated, corrected, and normalized. Rather than descending from a sovereign center, power circulates through countless social relations that precede and exceed formal political institutions. Through scientific discursivity and the modern confessional mode inherited from Christianity, individuals are continually compelled to reveal the “truth” of themselves. Although confession has largely migrated from the church to medicine, psychology, and the human sciences, its underlying logic remains remarkably intact.
This is why Foucault famously characterizes power as capillary. Like the smallest blood vessels branching throughout the body, power reaches into the most intimate dimensions of everyday existence. It is embedded in routines rather than decrees, habits rather than commands, and expectations rather than spectacular acts of coercion. The classroom, the hospital ward, the psychiatric clinic, and the prison all function as laboratories in which individuals gradually learn to regulate themselves. Surveillance is effective not because one is constantly watched, but because one comes to act as though one might be watched. The panopticon therefore represents far more than an architectural design; it is a political technology that transforms external observation into internal discipline.
This decentralized conception of power follows directly from Foucault’s broader theoretical commitment. If power produces knowledge and subjectivity, it cannot simply reside in the hands of a ruler waiting to be exercised. Every act of classification, every diagnosis, every examination, every bureaucratic form participates in producing the social reality through which individuals understand themselves. As Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality, “Power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations.” The significance of this formulation is that power is neither owned nor exhausted by any single institution. It exists only insofar as it is continually enacted through practices.
Consequently, the question “Who has power?” becomes less illuminating than “How is power exercised?” A physician does not possess power simply because she occupies a professional position. Rather, power emerges through the practices of diagnosis, observation, documentation, and treatment that constitute both physician and patient as recognizable social roles. Likewise, a teacher’s authority is sustained not merely by legal appointment but by examinations, grading systems, attendance registers, classroom routines, and countless pedagogical rituals. Power is relational before it is institutional.
This stands in sharp contrast to Althusser’s account of ideology. Although Althusser recognizes a plurality of institutions, they ultimately derive their significance from a common political function. Schools, churches, families, media organizations, and legal systems constitute what he calls the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). Unlike the Repressive State Apparatus, police, courts, and the military, which secures obedience primarily through coercion, ISAs operate predominantly through ideology. They shape how individuals understand themselves, their responsibilities, and their place within society.
Yet despite their apparent diversity, these institutions are not autonomous in the Foucauldian sense. Their differences conceal a shared purpose: the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. Schools do not simply educate; they produce disciplined workers. Families do not merely socialize children; they reproduce normative relations necessary for social stability. Religious institutions do not simply cultivate faith; they encourage forms of obedience compatible with existing social arrangements. Each apparatus appears independent, yet together they contribute to the continued dominance of the ruling class.
Here lies perhaps the most consequential difference between the two theorists. For Althusser, multiplicity ultimately serves unity. Ideological State Apparatuses may occasionally conflict, but their structural function remains singular: to reproduce the existing mode of production. Their apparent autonomy therefore masks an underlying political coherence.
For Foucault, no such unifying center exists.
Power certainly produces regularities and institutions, but these emerge from innumerable local struggles rather than from a coordinated strategy. A medical discourse may reinforce legal classifications; educational practices may converge with psychiatric knowledge; prisons may borrow techniques from schools. Yet this convergence should not be mistaken for evidence of a hidden sovereign directing every mechanism. The coherence of modern power is an effect of countless interacting practices rather than the implementation of a single political blueprint.
This distinction profoundly reshapes the possibility of resistance. If power is centralized, resistance naturally takes the form of confronting those who possess it. Revolution, class struggle, and the seizure of state power become the primary political horizon. If, however, power is dispersed throughout the ordinary practices of everyday life, resistance cannot be confined to a single institutional confrontation. It must also occur wherever subjects are constituted through competing discourses (couter-discourse), alternative forms of knowledge, new social practices, and the continual contestation of what counts as truth.
The disagreement between Foucault and Althusser therefore extends beyond institutional analysis. It reflects two fundamentally different ways of imagining political life. Althusser asks how ideology secures the reproduction of an already existing social order. Foucault asks how that very order continually comes into existence through the dispersed practices that organize knowledge, bodies, and conduct. One seeks the strategic center from which domination is reproduced; the other follows the countless relations through which power is continuously enacted.
If this comparison answers where power lives, it also raises a deeper question. If power is not simply exercised upon already existing individuals, what kind of human being does it produce? It is here that the two thinkers converge once more on the problem of subjectivity, while diverging over the scale at which power operates. Althusser’s ideology interpellates individuals as subjects within a capitalist order. Foucault’s power certainly constitutes subjects as well, but it also extends beyond the individual body to govern populations, transforming life itself into an object of political management. That broader shift marks the final and perhaps most far-reaching difference between their respective theories.
What Does Power Produce?
The final divergence between Foucault and Althusser concerns the scope of their theories of subject formation. Both reject the notion of a pre-social individual whose identity exists prior to institutions. Subjects are made rather than born. Yet they disagree over what power ultimately produces and the scale at which it operates.
For Althusser, ideology is fundamentally concerned with the production of the individual as a subject. The question is not merely how people think, but how they come to recognize themselves within social positions necessary for the reproduction of capitalism. Interpellation describes precisely this moment of recognition. When ideology “hails” an individual, whether as a citizen, a worker, a student, a parent, or a believer, that individual turns toward the call and simultaneously recognizes themselves within it. In doing so, they become a subject.
The brilliance of Althusser’s formulation lies in showing that subjection does not primarily occur through coercion. Individuals willingly occupy the identities ideology makes available because those identities appear natural, self-evident, and freely chosen.
The educational system exemplifies this process. Schools certainly transmit technical knowledge, but they also cultivate punctuality, obedience, competition, meritocracy, and respect for authority. More importantly, they sort individuals into differentiated positions within the division of labor. Through examinations, credentials, and institutional rituals, students gradually come to understand themselves as future professionals, managers, workers, or intellectuals. Ideology therefore produces subjects capable of reproducing the very social relations that produced them.
Power, for Althusser, ultimately culminates in the constitution of a useful individual.
Every ideological apparatus contributes toward this singular political objective: reproducing the labor force and maintaining the conditions under which capitalist production can continue. The subject is therefore both the outcome and the instrument of ideology.
Foucault shares Althusser’s interest in the production of subjects but refuses to stop there. His analysis begins with the disciplined individual but ultimately expands to encompass life itself. If disciplinary power concerns the optimization of individual bodies, biopower concerns the regulation of populations.
This distinction marks one of Foucault’s most important theoretical innovations. Beginning in the eighteenth century, political authority increasingly shifted its attention from isolated individuals to aggregate phenomena: birth rates, mortality, fertility, disease, longevity, sanitation, productivity, and public health. These are not characteristics of particular persons but statistical properties of populations.
Government therefore acquired a new object of intervention; not simply the individual citizen but the biological life of society itself.
Foucault captures this historical transformation through his famous contrast between sovereignty and biopolitics. Sovereign power possessed the right to “take life or let live.” Its authority manifested most dramatically through execution, warfare, and spectacular punishment. Biopower reverses this logic. Its primary objective is to “make live and let die.” Rather than governing through the public display of death, modern states increasingly govern by cultivating life: reducing infant mortality, extending life expectancy, managing epidemics, regulating sexuality, encouraging fertility, and optimizing labor productivity.
Paradoxically, this investment in life also generates new forms of exclusion. Once the health of the population becomes the object of political concern, distinctions emerge between lives worth cultivating and lives regarded as threats to collective well-being. Racism, eugenics, colonial administration, public hygiene campaigns, and modern security regimes become intelligible within this broader logic. Violence is no longer justified solely through sovereign authority but through appeals to biological protection, national health, and social survival.
This expansion from the individual to the population distinguishes Foucault’s account from Althusser’s. Ideology primarily explains how individuals become subjects within existing social relations. Foucault asks an additional question: how do entire populations become objects of political calculation?
The difference is subtle but profound. Althusser’s subject is positioned within the relations of production. Foucault’s subject exists simultaneously within networks of discipline and within biological populations subject to statistical management. The body becomes productive; the population becomes governable.
Seen together, these differences return us to the question posed at the beginning of this essay: who possesses power?
Both Foucault and Althusser suggest that the question itself is misleading. Neither begins with autonomous individuals who subsequently acquire or exercise power. Instead, both ask how those very individuals come into being. Subjects are not the origin of power but among its most enduring effects.
Their disagreement concerns how this process unfolds. Althusser understands ideology as reproducing capitalist domination by obscuring the material relations that organize society. Foucault understands power as a productive network of discourses and practices that generates truths, identities, and forms of life. One locates power within the strategic reproduction of class relations; the other follows its circulation through the innumerable practices that constitute everyday existence.
Yet perhaps their greatest shared contribution is the inversion they force upon our ordinary political imagination. We continue to speak as though power were something people possess: governments possess power, corporations possess power, parents possess power. Foucault and Althusser encourage us to ask a more unsettling question. Before asking who has power, we should ask how subjects capable of possessing anything are produced in the first place.
Power, then, is less a possession than a relation. It exists not because particular individuals own it but because it is continually enacted through institutions, discourses, and everyday practices that organize what can be known, believed, desired, and ultimately lived. In this sense, doing does not follow being. Rather, doing becomes being. We are not first subjects who then participate in social practices. We become subjects through the repeated enactment of those practices themselves.
So What?
Ultimately, both Foucault and Althusser reject the liberal image of the autonomous individual who simply possesses and exercises power. Instead, they ask how subjects capable of agency are constituted in the first place. Their divergence lies in how they answer that question. Althusser understands ideology as reproducing capitalist domination by interpellating individuals into subject positions that obscure the material relations of production. Foucault, by contrast, conceives power as productive, diffuse, and immanent, generating the very discourses, truths, and identities through which subjects come to recognize themselves. If Althusser asks how ideology reproduces the subject, Foucault asks how power produces the conditions under which subjectivity itself becomes possible. Power, then, is less something one possesses than something continually enacted through discursive and institutional practices.
In this sense, doing does not follow being; doing becomes being.
Reference:
Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation). In Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, Trans., pp. 127–186). Monthly Review Press. (Original work published 1970)
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”. Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1975)
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Volume I: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1976)
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1988). Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings, 1977–1984 (L. D. Kritzman, Ed.). Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (D. Macey, Trans.). Picador.
Foucault, M. (2010). The government of self and others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.
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