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Deviant Subjects in Foucault and A Clockwork Orange Criminological Constructions of Subjectivity  p a t j . g e h r k e 146 The clockwork metaphor has long been a tradition of Western sciences, both physical and social. Dreams of predicting and controlling human behavior have provoked nightmares of social control and behavior modiWcation. The development of these models in behavioral and social sciences provided the context in 1962 for Anthony Burgess’s best known work, A Clockwork Orange.1 In 1972, Stanley Kubrick released his Wlm adaptation of Burgess’s novel in Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, Michel Foucault published a series of related texts, including Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, and An Archeology of Knowledge.2 Three years after the release of Kubrick’s Wlm, Foucault published one of his most popular books, Discipline and Punish.3 During the same period, behavior modiWcation techniques such as aversion therapy were booming.4 This essay examines how Foucault’s writings and Kubrick’s Wlm lay out congruent critiques of social scientiWc and criminological attempts to deWne and constitute subjectivity. Foucault’s theoretical insights rarely have been elaborated in relation to popular texts of his time, often obscuring the historical position of his writing. By situating Foucault in relation to a popular text of his time, this analysis begins to uncover how the discursive formations of the epoch gave rise to resistances to social scientiWc and criminological constructions of subjectivity. This examination begins with a brief discussion of Foucault’s pertinence to communication studies and a basic review of his writings. Following is a summary of the Wlm version of A Clockwork Orange and a discussion of its centrality to European and American understandings of criminal deviancy . Next, the Wlm is analyzed through application of relevant sections of Foucault’s writings. The essay concludes with a discussion of the implications of this analysis for critical studies and for modern construction and management of deviancy. Michel Foucault: Critic and Critical Tool Foucault’s work is especially important to studies of Wlm and history because he oVers methods of investigating knowledge and power as well as the role of discourse in the generation of truths and the construction of subjectivities. Foucault’s work focuses heavily on these themes, especially in The Order of Things, Archeology of Knowledge, and Discipline and Punish. As Foucault isolates the ways that the sciences deWne what it means to be human—the subject that science creates—he also elucidates the practice of science itself. Works by Bogard and others spring from Discipline and Punish and expand Foucault’s analyses to include more recent dissuasion and disinclination methods.5 Foucault also provides insights in his extensive work on mental illness and deviancy that parallel the visions Kubrick presents to us in Orange. This essay begins from the question of the subject, using investigations of power, knowledge, and rules as tools to uncover how the subject is constituted and constitutes itself. In Foucault’s work we often Wnd a structure that leads us through history by way of discussions of subjectivity and the changes subjectivity undergoes. Hence, in Madness and Civilization Foucault takes us from the subject-position of the doctor in the Hospital General of seventeenth-century France to the subject-position of the modern psychiatrist. In Discipline and Punish he takes us from the subject-position of the slave to a violent discipline upon the body and, Wnally, to the subjectposition of the modern convict. In this way we are shown the changes in subjectivity, and the discourses and practices that construct these subjectivities , as well as the implications of both for the interplay of power and knowledge. We hit near the mark by recognizing the interrelation of these elements and the centrality of subjectivity to Foucault’s analysis. We should be careful to avoid treating subjectivity as merely another aspect of analysis, rather than the critical question. Foucault argues that the investigation of the ways that subjects are constituted socially and individually is the central focus of his work: Deviant Subjects in Foucault and A Clockwork Orange 147 So it was that I was led to pose the problem of knowledge/power, which is not for me the fundamental problem but an instrument allowing the analysis —in a way that seems to me to be the most exact—of the problem of relationships between subjects and games of truth.6 Thus, in the study of discipline we Wnd that “the elements are interchangeable , since...

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